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Before Tuesday’s announcement of the lineup for the 50th anniversary edition of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell, photographers crowded close to get shots of festival producer Quint Davis welcoming Mayor LaToya Cantrell. The greeting was official and cordial, but it also served as a reminder that Jazz Fest isn’t simply a musical or cultural event.

It’s great that Gambit Weekly called this week for better, fairer treatment of musicians in New Orleans considering the outsized role they play in not only shaping the city’s day to day reality but its identity for centuries. We need more voices to point out that the people who make the music are no longer able to afford to live in the city in many cases, and that the economic reality of a musician’s life is brutal. New Orleans does need to figure out ways to make it easier for musicians to make music here.

Brian Boyles' New Orleans Boom and Blackout: One Hundred Days in America's Coolest Hotspot examines the new New Orleans through the lens of the city's preparation for the Super Bowl 2012. His account examines the complicated interaction between government, monied interests, culture and the city and does so with a light but determined touch. Boyles lets people talks words and actions shape how we feel about them, but he doesn't let anybody off the hook.

I was amused on Saturday that Kirsha Kaechele led with her chin to re-enter the contemporary art conversation in New Orleans. She has been vilified as a wealthy art dilettante, and her activities timed to coincide with the start of Prospect 3 put money at the center. She literally put up $100,000 for a gun buy-back program, and the recording studio in a car wash on Franklin Avenue was tricked out with faux luxe.

We need to accept that the explosive downtown cultural renaissance that Frenchmen Street presides over is the result of a romantic vision of what New Orleans should be, more than a continuation of how it has been. Frenchmen Street represents a recreation of New Orleans in a particular version of its own image. Change, yes, shaped by myth.

Just days before, a family member of a French Quarter T-shirt shop owner wrote me, saying

Tuesday I received a press release trumpeting the success of New Orleans in attracting tourists, and it’s hard not to look at the announcement without at least a twinge of uneasiness. According to the study, New Orleans had 9.28 million visitors last year, and to the extent that the number represents money coming into the city, that’s a good thing.

If we have one duty to New Orleans, it's to not contribute to its caricature. We've spent years trying to assert that there's more to Carnival than boobs on Bourbon Street, that we're not drunkenly indifferent to work and the weather, and that there's more to our music than horns and accordions. This isn't a city of native "up from the pavement" talent, but a place where people at every level take music and creativity seriously, and just because the learning doesn't always take place in schools doesn't mean musicians aren't getting education in their craft.